Short Sharp Shocks
BACK in the glory days of the old-school cinema going experience, it was commonplace for the main attraction in your friendly neighbourhood movie house to be augmented by a short supporting feature.
While most of the lead films which graced the big screen in that simpler time – be they now considered classics or crud – are remembered to at least some degree, many of those tasty little shorts that propped up the main event have been tragically lost to the winds of time, recalled only in half-remembered nostalgic awe by movie buffs in online discussion groups.
Thankfully the BFI's always admirable Flipside imprint – which dedicates itself to digging deep under the fingernails of British cinema output to unearth lost or unloved movie artefacts – has given over its 41st full Blu-ray offering to the world of the weird and wonderful short supporting feature.
Across two discs, Short Sharp Shocks spins us back through four decades of short-form delight to deliver nine small but perfectly formed films for our 21st century pleasure.
The earliest offerings come from 1949 and involve author Algernon Blackwood delivering spoken word re-tellings of a couple of his supernatural tales, Lock Your Door and The Reformation of St Jude. Spooky, if delivered with all the verve of an elderly relative rambling away at the Christmas table, they set the general mood of unease that permeates much on offer here rather nicely.
From there on in, it's a mixed bag of shaggy dog stories, camp tales of bullfighters and outlandish experiments like The Sex Victims, which feels like a tawdry 70s softcore porno that's been melded with a high minded European art house flick.
That particular tale of a randy and thoroughly unlikeable trucker who experiences a visitation from a naked woman riding a horse through the English countryside probably deserves a full column to itself, but it's only one of the strange and slightly unsettling highlights to be found here.
Best of the bunch, to my eyes at least, is a trio of odd little gems which are peppered across the discs. There's Twenty Nine, a 'swinging London' study of infidelity and early mid-life crisis that features a stunning performance from a young Alexis Kanner (who you may know from a couple of the finest episodes of The Prisoner) and some startling sequences shot within the walls of Soho's sleaziest strip joints, and The Lake, a 1978 mood piece that creeps up on you like the very finest psychological horror should – but best of all is The Tell Tale Heart.
Long considered lost forever, this barnstorming re-telling of Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story features a one man performance from the great Stanley Baker that is simply stunning. Pretty much unseen anywhere since its 1953 release, it's a gloomy back and white beauty and Baker holds the screen with his every Gothic flourish.
Like the actor himself and this whole Flipside project in general, it's mean and moody, magnificently overblown at times and hugely entertaining from start to finish.
Who could ask for more than that?
